1. Field of the Disclosure
The present disclosure relates to providing increased bandwidth to a site using access physical links. More particularly, the present disclosure relates to logically bonding the physical ports available to a site into a group and sending data to and receiving data from the site over the physical links associated with the logically bonded group of physical ports.
2. Background Information
Currently, access network technologies providing end-to-end connections include fiber to the premises (FTTp) and fiber to the neighborhood (FTTn). Fiber to the premises technology is typically deployed in optical fiber networks employing passive optical network (PON) technology to provide connections to customer premises equipment (CPE) devices. On the other hand, fiber to the neighborhood technology leverages the existing copper wires connecting customer premises equipment devices to a digital subscriber line access multiplexer (DSLAM). Although current technologies (e.g., asymmetric digital subscriber line technology) provide a subscriber with enhanced data rates over copper wires, the bandwidth provided and the distance over which data is carried is effectively limited.
To address these limitations, two copper pair wires have been bonded together to increase the bandwidth available to a subscriber in an approach known as “pair bonding.” In the pair bonding approach, a network link assignment system tags one copper pair as a master link and a second copper pair as a slave link. Next, an installer manually plugs the master link into the master port and the slave link into the slave port on a subscriber's intelligent network interface device (iNID) at a subscriber location. Additionally, the master link is connected to the master port and the slave link is connected to the slave port on the digital subscriber line access multiplexer. The digital subscriber line access multiplexer carries traffic through both the master port over the master link and the slave port over the slave link, only as long as the master port is operative. If the master port becomes inoperative, traffic will not be transmitted.